Dark Sector (Review/First Impressions)

[Tanthalos]

Well I only got to chapter 3 of Dark Sector before I stopped playing it. Even though I would love to sit down and beat the game to a pulp in one sitting today I only rented it to see if it was something to add to the list I was told to put togther regarding my birthday.
Yes I will be adding it to the list, in fact it is now my number 1 priority.

Let me start off by saying that when I first gave the disc a spin it immediately reminded me of Resident Evil 4. It would fit like a glove to any one who enjoyed Resident Evil 4.
You have the over the shoulder and slightly back camera angle of RE4 as well as the main character who is ruggidly handome and finds himslf infected with the mystery virus that will be the driving point of the game's story.
(Before a few people get mad at me for spoiling the fact he gets infected, please remember h has a bladed weapon growing out of his hand on the box and the phrase "now you are a bioweapon" written on the back.)

First I would like to talk about controls. Aiming and shooting are standard and stright forward, as is changing between weapons. Accuracy for the most part is determined by the player, if you line their head up in the center of the targeting circle you will headshot them. Not that the machine gun doesn't have some kick to it but at least it still hits the general area as oppose to shooting off into the sky every time you pull the trigger.

Movement control is smooth and responsive.

But where this game shines the most and has the biggest blemish is the X button. Your character is not a complete moron so when you hit X he will roll, slide or slam into the closest proper cover he can find. He can shoot from cover without walking out into the open and he will not shoot into the wall on his own accord if you try to aim and shoot from around a corner. Most solidly constructed things in the game can be used as cover. The only time cover breaks is when you are using something made from wood as cover and you throw out the bladed disc cause it will tear the wood apart on its way back to you.
The problem is they also made the X button the button for running and dashing so in the middle of combat in the beginning you might get annoyed. Once you remember tap X to go into cover, press and hold for run the annoyance evaporates.
(At best personally I found this to be a short term minor annoyance.)

Now to talk about the blade disc. This is a cute, well executed idea. Not only does it allow a player with good aim to kill enemies when they are behind cover. Not only does it cut through soft surfaces like wood. It has a "steal" function.
The steal function is as follows. If you run out of ammo while behind cover or an item is unreachable by standard means. You target an item anywhere on the field and your targeting circle will turn into a little energy vortex type thing, release the blade disc and it will bring the item back to you.
Also you can fire your hand gun using R1 and throw the disc blade with R2 one immediately after the other. Which allows for nice 1, 2 combos on some of the tougher enemies.

Graphically the game is very beautiful. The characters, for the most part are well done in gameplay (Anyone and their mom can make sweet looking people in cinematic scenes). The lighting effects are proper with good shadow play.
None of the character voice actors made me want to stab myself in the ear drum before continuing on.

The game has a series of checkpoints though I only found that out after I died for there was no "saving checkpoint" line acros the screen in white as I went from room to room. Also in general the game tends to do all of its loading between levels and takes very little time with such loading.

Now I can't have a review without saying some bad things even though for me personally this game is as close to perfect as I have ever seen.
Nit picking time...

A) Fighting a helicopter in an open field is not the best idea if you have not given the person time to get use to the difference between running and going into cover.
B) Make the undeground market acessible early on, apparently this alllows for upgrades of weapons etc. But going into chapter 3 I hadn't had the option yet of going to it.
C) This is a complaint though personally for me it was a very minor annoyance that I have gotten use to. Normal guns outside of your handgun have a timer limit that starts to count down when the weapon is handled by an infected person. After a period of time the weapon basically disintergrates in your hand with a blinding flash of light. Now I know they did this to prevent your from grabbing your favorite weapon (the shotgun or assualt rifle) and playing the game ignoring the cool gimmick they devised.
Do not worry they did not add such a timer to grenades or other explosives.

I would say this game is a "Buy it" hands down.
If you were a fan of Resident Evil 4 you will love this game because it improves on every
aspect of it.
If you are not a fan of Resident Evil 4 I would still say "Buy it" because they have fixed everything stupid and inane you found about the RE4 game. Except if your issue was camera angle then your out of luck so just "rent it".

 

[PurpleRain]

(Cries) How's the games gore and violence? Was it enough to get the thing banned?

 

[Sentient Muffin]

I doubt you ever played Gears of War.

I can tell you, I played through the game in two sittings and its not wonderful or anything. But the game does have a lot of "cool". Easily enough to justify a play-through...but not really a 60$ purchase...

 

[irrelevantnugget]

I doubt you ever played Gears of War.

I can tell you, I played through the game in two sittings and its not wonderful or anything. But the game does have a lot of "cool". Easily enough to justify a play-through...but not really a 60$ purchase...

That's why there's multiplayer. Which is pretty much made of win.

 

[Tanthalos]

The game's gore and violence? While you do not have huge blood splatters four miles high the game is realistic enough.

Example: When I threw the blade disc at an enemy who was just spinning into cover it cut his leg off just above the knee. At which point he fell to the ground screaming and clutching at his stump as he quickly bled out.

I doubt you ever played Gears of War.

Actually I have gone through Gears of War in one sitting. I found the game while to be graphically very beautiful, a fail in every other category.

There is no game challenge once you have mastered the controller. Once I learned which buttons to press it didn't matter who, what, or how many of an enemy there were for the challenge rating was the same. While I understand learning controls is important, level layout and bad guys should add some form of difficulty or challenge. Movement controls were slow responding and jerky compared to other FPS like Halo 3 and Blacksite.

The characters are annoying. The fact that they had no story and as such they tried to pass it off as a "you'll see as you progress" which means "we will make it up as we go along" is sad.

Outside of the Dawn Hammer all the weapons were average with nothing special about them. The chainsaw was sloppy at best (ba dum dum).

Options for cover where limited when there was no reason for them to be. An example is in the first prison level there are multiple wide solid concrete pilars that you can't use for cover for reasons that can only be decribed as "poor programming" or "mean spirited".

 

[PurpleRain]

The game's gore and violence? While you do not have huge blood splatters four miles high the game is realistic enough.

Example: When I threw the blade disc at an enemy who was just spinning into cover it cut his leg off just above the knee. At which point he fell to the ground screaming and clutching at his stump as he quickly bled out.

Hmm, probably due to the realsim then? The whole reason it got banned in Australia was because of its violence. Yet in Gears of War you can chainsaw a person in half as blood sprays on the screen. Does that seem right to you?

 

[Saskwach]

The game's gore and violence? While you do not have huge blood splatters four miles high the game is realistic enough.

Example: When I threw the blade disc at an enemy who was just spinning into cover it cut his leg off just above the knee. At which point he fell to the ground screaming and clutching at his stump as he quickly bled out.

Hmm, probably due to the realsim then? The whole reason it got banned in Australia was because of its violence. Yet in Gears of War you can chainsaw a person in half as blood sprays on the screen. Does that seem right to you?

Not to me, but then again I value things like reason and consistency. This is the first time a game I really wanted to try was banned and I'm mad.

 

[Sentient Muffin]

The game's gore and violence? While you do not have huge blood splatters four miles high the game is realistic enough.

Example: When I threw the blade disc at an enemy who was just spinning into cover it cut his leg off just above the knee. At which point he fell to the ground screaming and clutching at his stump as he quickly bled out.

I doubt you ever played Gears of War.

Actually I have gone through Gears of War in one sitting. I found the game while to be graphically very beautiful, a fail in every other category.

There is no game challenge once you have mastered the controller. Once I learned which buttons to press it didn't matter who, what, or how many of an enemy there were for the challenge rating was the same. While I understand learning controls is important, level layout and bad guys should add some form of difficulty or challenge. Movement controls were slow responding and jerky compared to other FPS like Halo 3 and Blacksite.

The characters are annoying. The fact that they had no story and as such they tried to pass it off as a "you'll see as you progress" which means "we will make it up as we go along" is sad.

Outside of the Dawn Hammer all the weapons were average with nothing special about them. The chainsaw was sloppy at best (ba dum dum).

Options for cover where limited when there was no reason for them to be. An example is in the first prison level there are multiple wide solid concrete pilars that you can't use for cover for reasons that can only be decribed as "poor programming" or "mean spirited".

Seriously dude, I'm not someone who thinks Gears is the "Be all, End all" of shooters, but it was certainly better than Dark Sector. No shooter had a roll+sprint+hit-cover button until Gears, and Dark Sector copied it exactly. Now, I wouldn't have to much of a problem with this if they had copied the cover system completely, but they didn't. Most of the time it works, you move over to where you need to be and hit that X/A button and your good. Hold L1/LT to poop up and waste some baddies. But once in a while I would run into annoyances. The minor one being that I was up against low cover and the enemy pursuing me was a short creature approaching from the side. I moved the proper side of cover and held down L1, but instead of popping out the side, Hayden rises to his feet with no way of me changing that. By the time I realized this the enemy was too close for me to stay in cover and aim to my lower left so I was force abandon my cover and to duke it out in close combat. Annoyance number 2: Why the hell can't I blind fire? But number 3 was what really got me, enemies were shooting hitting me despite the fact that I was behind cover. This problem was the strongest when your fighting those infected creatures that shoot those spreading blasts of energy from their hands. The blasts spread so slowly that they managed to nick me in the head or shoulder even if I was supposed to be covered. This is especially irritating when your on a sliver of health and JUST managed to make it to cover. If the humans are enemies however, then you don't really have to worry about this, just watch out for weirdly shaped cover because if your upper body is poorly protected theirs no crouch function to deal with this, you know, like in Gears.

I found the "Arbitrary use of Cover" problem more in Dark Sector...I think, I know I had an example...forgot it. ^^' Escapist goers out their, just trust me on this one...

So the weapons in Dark Sector are original? Which ones are you referring to...Handgun, Automatic Handgun, Assualt Rifle, Bigger Assualt Rifle, Shotgun, Bigger Shotgun or Rocket Launcher? Your not gonna base your argument on one glave I hope, even if it is versatile.

NEITHER game has a story worth shit. Few shooters do. Bioshock being the only one I can think of in recent memory. The characters in Gears are just plain fun though, even if they lack depth, its fun just to hear them banter and *****. In Dark Sector the characters are likable (the mad scientist has the most EPIC bad guy in history) and Hayden himself is cool. But its always hinting that theirs some big story going on but never makes any REAL effort to make it apparent. We know Hayden has problems, what the hell are they? He killed some people...details por favor? No, we don't get any.

And why are weapons so expensive? To buy a standard shotgun I had to wait until chapter 5 (out of 10) before I had 26000 credits to do so. The upgrade system is pretty neat though, if only I had enough weapons to experiment with. In Resident Evil 4 it was well balanced to where you could buy a healthy amount of weapons without being overpowered near the earlier parts of the game. In Dark Sector the upgrade system I guess is more like a customization system, you can only use a few actual upgrades for each individual weapon and the upgrades are "Stronger" than in RE4. But this isn't an improvement, its just a "difference", one that forces players to limit their weapon choices severely. The fact that you have a locker to keep weapons in is a joke.

That's why there's multiplayer. Which is pretty much made of win.[/qoute]

No, even the multiplayer isn't worth it. It would be considered ACCEPTABLE if they fixed they bugs and lag issues. And if one of the TWO game modes wasn't broken.

Don't get me wrong, I like Dark Sector. For one play through that is, maybe a second when I'm feeling bored.

Edit: Did I scare everyone away?